Elizabeth Sibilia is a Postdoctoral Fellow working on the ERC funded PORTS project, led by Associate Professor Elisabeth Schober. The PORTS project is a multiyear and multi-sited project that focuses attention on four port cities - Rotterdam, Piraeus, Pusan, and Singapore - as a way to investigate the dynamic and contradictory tendencies of the global economy. Sibilia's work on PORTS stems from her research in the port-city of Singapore and focuses on the organizational landscape of energy transition, its impact on port development, and the multi-scaled implications it has on novel geographies of trade and producing uneven maritime worlds.
Background
Broadly, Sibilia's research focuses on understanding the ways in which the maritime economy produces conditions for uneven development and novel geographies of inequality. Her PhD project examined how transformations in the shipping markets, underpinned by global economic restructuring, conditioned a new scale and form of shipbreaking in Bangladesh that helped to produce a coastal landscape that tied the daily lives of shipbreakers to global cycles of accumulation.
Sibilia is a geographer and received a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, with a specialization in Human Geography. She holds an MA in Geography from Hunter College and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Before joining the PORTS team, Sibilia held Lecturer posts at California State University East Bay, San Jose State University, and at the Macaulay Honors Program at the College of Staten Island. Her writing has been featured in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Focus on Geography , and she is the co-editor of a themed issue with Dr. Camelia Dewan in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space on toxic flows.
Academic Interests
Maritime worlds, energy transition, maritime decarbonization, oceanic urbanism, toxic geographies, financialization of shipping, labor and social reproduction, and uneven geographical development
Publications
Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar, Elisabeth Schober, Elizabeth Sibilia, Hege Høyer Leivestad, Giorgos Poulimenakos (2023) "Crisis in Movement. Making and Remaking Global Supply Chains in Container Ports," Anthropologica, Vol. 65: 1.
Dewan C and E Sibilia (2023) "Global Containments and Local Leakages: Structural Violence and The Toxic Flows of Shipbreaking," Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231208202.
Sibilia E (2019) “Oceanic accumulation: Geographies of speculation, overproduction, and crisis in the global shipping economy,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space . Vol 51 (2): 467-486. (Paper awarded the 2019 Ashby Prize from Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.)
Sibilia E (2015) “Zones of risk: the spaces and places of shipbreaking,” FOCUS on Geography . Vol. 58 (4).
Bacon N, Matthew Bissen, Marnie Brady, Zoltán Glück, Malav Kanuga, Steve McFarland, Jessica Miller, Elizabeth Sibilia, Erin Siodmak, and Laurel Mei Turbin (2012) “Contours of a spatialized influence: a tribute to Neil Smith,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space , 30 (6): 935-955.